“Ahem... cough, cough! Ugh... what is this... why does my throat hurt so much...?”
My back was stiff from sleeping so deeply, and my throat felt raw and scratchy.
As I brushed away whatever was tickling my face and sat up, the strange sensation at my fingertips muddled my sleep-drunk mind.
Because instead of the soft feel of a bed, it was hard and dry, like dirt.
“.....Am I not fully awake yet? Ah, damn... what is this?”
The roughness under my fingertips and the cold wind that belatedly swept over my whole body made me shiver.
When I looked around, I saw—
“Huh? What is this? Did the world end while I was asleep for a second?”
Ruined buildings and roads, flowers and nameless plants blooming through the cracks in the asphalt, and thick vines wrapping around abandoned structures.
Above all, the cracked asphalt exposing dirt paths beneath it, paired with the oppressive, dark sky, made the city look like something straight out of an apocalyptic novel.
“Wow, this is seriously eerie and cold. No, wait! It really is freezing! Brrr!”
I hurried into one of the abandoned buildings to escape the biting night wind.
It was creepy, but my priorities were to escape the cold and figure out my surroundings, so I climbed to a higher floor to get a better view of the landscape.
“Wow... there isn’t a single light on. Looking at it like this, it really does seem like some doomed city from a zombie movie.”
This was no joke.
Everything around me was pitch-black, making it nearly impossible to grasp the situation. My hope that at least one place would have its lights on was thoroughly dashed.
The dark night sky was studded with countless stars, and a waning half-moon cast a faint, ghostly glow.
“Hmm... what the hell happened? If a war had broken out, I should’ve woken up from the noise... hmm...”
Lying back on the rooftop and thinking it over, I still couldn’t come up with an answer.
It made sense that I was confused. Before I fell asleep, people had still been going about their daily lives—even if they were complaining about how hard life was—and there had been no sign of war at all.
“Come to think of it, I was supposed to do my MapleStory raids and NIKKE Interception battles. I’m screwed.”
Even though the situation looked dire, I still couldn’t help thinking about my games, feeling a small pang of disappointment that my daily login streak had been broken.
I was a twenty-six-year-old job seeker.
A perfectly ordinary Korean guy who had completed his military service at twenty and graduated from a run-of-the-mill four-year university.
Still, if there was one thing that set me apart, it was that I was weirdly lucky.
A streak of incredible luck in my twenties had made my youth quite flashy.
I had bombed the CSAT and barely scraped into one university through early admissions, but then I also got accepted to a top-tier university I’d applied to on a whim. Naturally, I chose the latter.
I got a pretty girlfriend and made plenty of drinking buddies and college friends.
But I’d always had a strong outsider streak by nature, so after finishing my first semester of freshman year, I decided to break up with the girlfriend I’d been seeing.
Why did I break up? I don't know. I just had this feeling that if I didn’t enlist in the army then, something would go wrong, and every time I met her, I got this weird, uneasy vibe.
She said she’d wait for me, but who knows? According to the news I heard right after I made private first class, she’d been playing multiple guys on the side, got publicly humiliated across the entire campus, and dropped out. I never saw her again after that.
After that, I spent my military service in a perfectly ordinary way and smoothly continued my college life.
Then, in my graduation year, I experienced the miracle of winning the first prize in the lottery twice.
1.7 billion won after tax, plus a pension lottery paying 5 million won a month for twenty years.
I gave 1.4 billion to my parents and used the remaining 300 million and the pension to move out and find my own way in life.
Well, that was how I ended up living the life of a professional gamer under the guise of job hunting.
“Wow, I really did end up this screwed. How am I supposed to live now?”
The cold, hard ground and the chill night air only aggravated my troubled mind. As I lay there—
“Forget it. What’s the point of moping? I need to do something if I want to survive.”
I quickly decided that the priority was to accept reality and figure out whether my current situation was dangerous or safe.
Seriously, if a guy who’d been living just fine suddenly woke up at the edge of the apocalypse instead of some empty field, could he really be expected to keep his wits about him?
Of course, I wanted to give up. The urge to just end it all and leave this world behind kept surging up.
But—
“It’d be a waste to die. As the saying goes, it's better to roll in a dung heap in this world than to be in the next.”
I was still in my mid-twenties with my whole life ahead of me, which made me even less willing to die.
Rather, I wanted to live. I wanted to hold out until the very end.
Realizing quickly that collapsing in despair and giving up wasn’t the answer, I—
“For now, let’s sleep.”
I took a brief nap, using sleep as a temporary escape from reality.
==========
When I came to my senses, blinded by the light stabbing at my eyes, I was back on the rooftop of the abandoned building where I’d lain down yesterday.
When I looked around, it was the same end-of-the-world scene I’d seen before.
The sky was annoyingly clear and bright again.
“...Sigh. Figures. I was an idiot to think it was a dream.”
The moment I got up and tried to brush myself off—
“Did I really have clothes like this on?”
A black shirt, slacks made of some strange fabric, and a white coat that somehow looked incredibly sturdy.
I was sure I’d been wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt that were easy to move in.
“It looks kind of expensive, but it’s stretchy too. Whoa, this coat is super light!”
The clothes were light overall.
So light it felt as if I weren’t wearing anything at all.
After stretching and doing a few jumps in place, it honestly felt like I was moving in my bare body.
“Man, whatever this is, it’s great for movin—”
Clunk!
“.....Huh? What is this?”
The moment I tried to take a step, I looked down at something caught near my feet.
“.......This looks familiar.......Wait! Isn’t this an [Appsolabs Knuckle]?!”
There, lying on the ground, was one of the game items I’d used before: the [Appsolabs Knuckle].
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